Landing a data center is worth the environmental tradeoffs, Illinois towns say

Chicago Tribune

23-03-2025

The Minooka data center would take up to 340 acres, or slightly more than Chicago's Grant Park.
It would need 3 million gallons of water a day. That's a third of all the drinkable water Minooka will be allowed to draw from a $1.54 billion pipeline it's building with five other towns to access Lake Michigan water through Chicago.
It would need a 700-megawatt supply of electricity, enough for half of Chicago's households.
For Ric Offerman, Minooka's mayor, these are inescapable environmental tradeoffs to secure a multibillion-dollar investment from Equinix, Inc., a Redwood City, California-based company that operates 260 data centers in 33 countries.
Offerman said Equinix could bring hundreds of permanent jobs to the village of 13,000 people 40 miles southwest of Chicago. It could bring in tens of millions in added tax dollars each year, even after an abatement the company is seeking.
And unlike a proposed Canadian National Railway terminal nearby, Offerman said the data center wouldn't flood Minooka's central commercial district with hundreds of thousands of diesel trucks each year. He's in court defending weight limits that keep trucks off the roads leading to downtown.
Data centers give farm towns such as Minooka standing in the high-flying world of Equinix and its data center partners, which include Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Nvidia. But they're straining Minooka's effort to wean itself off underground aquifers that threaten to run dry and jeopardizing the state's bid to end the burning of fossil fuel in its power plants.
The uncertainties are so great that, months after first proposing the data center to Minooka officials, Matt Baumann of Equinix said he's not sure it will ever get built. He's still scrambling to line up electricity and water to break ground next year and complete the project by 2034.
'I would love to not be in limbo right now, trust me,' Baumann, the company's real estate director for the Americas, said in an interview Wednesday. Still, he described the approval processes he's encountered in Minooka and the rest of Illinois as 'fairly standard.''
Offerman is a retired history teacher from Channahon Junior High School. He's running unopposed in the April 1 election for the part-time job of Minooka mayor. At age 80, he's the village elder as Minooka tries to nail down the Equinix investment and confront painful choices about its future.
'First of all, if somebody wants to sell their property, you can't stop them. So we're trying to make this data center something positive,' Offerman said.
'We're looking at it as something that's going to be a good generator, tax-wise,' he said. 'It's going to be one of the more positive things that could sit there.'
Displaced and discouraged
Dan and Dee Roberts have been growing corn and soybeans for 59 years on the spot north of town where Equinix wants to build its data center.
They leased the land most recently from the family of Amin Khater. He began purchasing farmland after migrating from Syria in the 1950s and becoming a prominent Joliet doctor. He died in 2018, and his family now has a contract to sell the land to Equinix.
Together, Dan Roberts, his brother Don, and two sons farm several thousand acres that they own or lease in and around Minooka. Don Roberts is married to Ric Offerman's sister, Lynette.
Dan and Don Roberts live next door to each other in brick ranch houses at the northeast corner of the data center site. In between, there's a cluster of farm offices, sheds and grain storage bins, the tallest of which rises 130 feet and has a big American flag flying on top.
Dan Roberts found out about the data center in December. He didn't tell his wife until after Christmas because he didn't want to ruin her holiday. When he finally told her, Dee Roberts said she spent two weeks crying.
'You can't buy my memories. You can't buy my dreams. What we have here, I don't care how much money we get. I'll never have a place like this again,' she said.
'I mean, this was barren here, and we built it all ourselves,' Dee Roberts said. 'We raised our kids here. I worked in the fields with these guys. I helped build the house. I remember having a single driveway with a garden at the end, and then it just kind of ballooned.'
She acknowledged Equinix can't force her out. In fact, the company has already told them it's not interested in paying the Roberts' initial estimated price for their homes and business structures. Now, she said, they don't know if they'll ever get an offer from Equinix or whether they'd accept it if they did.
'There's a difference between being forced out and being in a place where you really don't want to be anymore,' Dee Roberts said.
From their front window, the Roberts can see the planned route of the Lake Michigan pipeline, plus the future site of an 80-acre solar farm.
Out their back window, they often see steam rising from a Vistra Corp. natural gas power plant just a few hundred yards away.
They can also see fields covered with brown dirt and corn stalk remnants from last year's harvest. The fields stretch uninterrupted for a mile and a half south to the I-80 freeway.
Soon, that view could be obstructed by two columns of four one-story gray and windowless buildings, each with a footprint about the size of a Walmart Supercenter. About half the site would be for buildings, and the other half for green space, retention ponds, parking lots and a big electric substation.
Inside, the buildings would be cool, dark and mostly deserted, with endless rows of computer servers stacked inside cabinets about 6 feet tall. According to a Cisco Systems video on data centers, the concentrated mass of servers would make a deep-throated whirring sound about as loud as a vacuum cleaner.
According to Linus Tech Tips, a YouTube channel, Equinix workers would encounter massively redundant cages, video cameras and biometric security checkpoints wherever they go. These would keep unwanted visitors away from the proprietary servers and software that an Equinix partner such as Google would be running for its customers.
The buildings have voracious appetites for electricity because, according to Goldman Sachs, a ChatGPT artificial intelligence search uses nearly 10 times more energy on average than the same question on Google. Cryptocurrency power requirements are huge.
In addition, the buildings have voracious appetites for water because water is the cheapest way to remove heat from the servers.
'When you use your phone to order an Uber or make a doctor's appointment, it's likely going through one of our data centers,' Baumann told a Minooka Village Board meeting in January.
'We consider ourselves a utility, like water or sewer or electricity. It has that kind of importance to everyday life,' he said.
But Equinix is not a regulated utility like ComEd or Peoples Gas. Equinix is a publicly traded company whose top shareholders are Wall Street titans such as BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard.
It's a supplier that's kept on a tight leash by the big dogs of artificial intelligence, namely, its partners, including Microsoft and Google.
Google's parent Alphabet reported a net profit margin of 28.6% for 2024. Equinix reported a 9.3% margin, about average for companies in the Standard and Poor's 500-stock index.
A water crunch
At a Wednesday Minooka Village Board meeting, the main topic was water and how to squeeze Equinix's request for 3 million gallons a day out of Minooka's total allocation of 9 million when the pipeline is set to open in 2030.
It's a sensitive question in part because the pipeline will transport water that the city of Chicago has not only withdrawn from Lake Michigan but also treated so it's drinkable. So Minooka will need approval from the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.
'One of the questions the state will ask is, is it really the highest and best use of a finite resource to use drinkable water to cool a computer?' said Hugh O'Hara, executive director of the Will County Governmental League and a longtime pipeline planner.
Jeremy Mickler, Equinix's global design director, began his presentation Wednesday by saying Equinix had cut in half its original water request for 6 million gallons. The company did so, he said, to reduce its use of drinkable water and to begin opening portions of the data center faster.
Equinix cut its projected water use so dramatically, he said, by deciding to cool half of the servers in Minooka with air only instead of a combination of air and water. The downside, he said, is that air cooling is so much less efficient that the Minooka facility would need nearly 700 megawatts of electricity, up from the original forecast of 600 megawatts. The data center would also use eight 3.5-megawatt diesel generators for backup. Cost is another incentive to conserve water. Village Administrator Dan Duffy said the pipeline could contribute to the doubling of the combined monthly water, sewer and garbage bills for Minooka households by 2030. The current average is $124.
Duffy said the village hopes to lower this increase and keep monthly bills affordable by asking Equinix to pay for a portion of the pipeline hookup fees and improvements to water pipes, wastewater treatment and roads near the site.
Mickler also said Equinix hoped its use of 3 million gallons of drinkable water daily would end as soon as possible. Eventually, he said, Equinix wants to operate the entire facility with greywater, or recycled wastewater, not just from its own operations but also from surrounding homes and businesses.
He said Equinix has used this approach overseas but not in the United States. The Minooka project would be the largest ever attempted in Illinois and would require the state to adopt greywater regulations it does not now have. It would also require more wastewater treatment capacity in Minooka.
Equinix is also looking to export warm discharge water from the data center to heat and cool nearby homes and businesses.
In his third announcement, Mickler said Equinix still doesn't know if ComEd will be able to hook the data center up to high-capacity transmission lines that pass directly alongside the southeast edge of its property. These lines help Illinois export a fifth of its power to other states.
Mickler said Equinix has to wait because it's one of a dozen nearby data centers that have applied to hook up to the ComEd-owned power lines.
Baumann said Equinix can't finalize even the broad outlines of its Minooka design until ComEd responds in a few weeks.
'Ten years ago, we would have gone ahead with this risk because our ability to pull power was a lot more achievable,' he said. 'But demand has grown, so now we're at the point where we need to be sure the power will be able to get there.'
ComEd said in a statement Friday it's receiving a large volume of data center hookup requests but also must maintain reliable service for all its customers.
'The Equinix project is continuing to move through the required study and design processes that are essential to safely and reliably connecting a new load of this size,'' the utility's statement said.
Extending fossil fuels
The Vistra natural gas power plant is only a quarter mile from the data center site. But it may not be of much help to Equinix. That's because its power is mostly committed to providing a quick response during peak demand seasons, such as summer air conditioning.
If the ComEd hookup falls through, Baumann said Equinix would consider connecting the data center to one of several interstate natural gas pipelines that cross in or near Minooka.
Data centers aren't allowed to do that now. But Marc Poulos, a top Democratic fundraiser in Springfield, said he's working with legislators on a bill to allow data centers to hook up to natural gas pipelines or power plants.
Poulos, executive director of labor-management operations for International Union of Operating Engineers Local 150, predicts a massive surge in natural gas use in Illinois. He calls this wise public policy because, in his view, decarbonization is a goal that's still decades away.Data centers, meanwhile, have taken Yorkville by storm. In an interview, City Administrator Bart Olson rattled 10 projects off the top of his head. After a year of paperwork, the city has approved its first data center, and construction will start on 230 acres next year. All told, Yorkville has had data center operators and investors express interest in another 3,000 acres, he said.Yorkville, also switching from aquifers to a Lake Michigan pipeline, has told developers it's interested only in air-cooled data centers. They use a quarter of the water of their water-cooled counterparts, or about as much as a big residential subdivision, Olson said.He agreed that hooking up to ComEd can be slow. 'If they've already applied, they may be a year or two out from getting their power allocation,'' Olson said. 'Some of them told us they may be four or five years out.''
When Springfield lawmakers passed the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act, or CEJA, in 2021, they set a goal of ending the burning of fossil fuels in Illinois power plants by 2045. However, surging data center demand is making this goal harder to achieve.
When it hooks up to ComEd-operated transmission lines, Equinix will use the same mix of energy sources as other Illinoisans.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, this includes nuclear power, which provided 55% of the state's total power in 2023, with fossil fuels, including natural gas, accounting for 32% and renewables 13%.Including projects still in development, renewable power accounts for 19% of Illinois' retail sales, said Brian Granahan, director of the Illinois Power Agency, which helps Illinois residents buy clean and affordable power.
That's short of the 25% goal for 2025, and some of these projects will have to wait years to connect to regional transmission grids.
Who will pay?
Even if data centers use perfectly pristine electricity, they need so much they could drive up prices for everybody else.
In 2023, ComEd predicted a 40% increase in its electricity deliveries by 2040, primarily because of data centers.
Cushman & Wakefield, a Chicago-based real estate services firm, expects electricity demand for northeastern Illinois data centers to more than triple.Chicago-area data centers currently use 1,159 megawatts of electricity. The facilities under construction or planned will add another 2,726 megawatts, Cushman & Wakefield said. In total, that's enough electricity for five times the number of households in Chicago.Northwest Indiana and eastern Iowa are also growing rapidly. Northern Virginia remains the world's largest data center market, 10 times bigger than Chicago, mostly because of U.S. government contracts, Cushman & Wakefield said.
Electricity providers are already looking ahead to higher prices.
On the state's Plugin Illinois website, several small competitors to the big utilities are offering contracts that lock in for, say, two years, electricity prices that are twice as high as ComEd's hourly rate. The Illinois Commerce Commission runs auctions on the site so customers can pick which provider they want.
Hugh O'Hara of the Will County Governmental League said that by offering these contracts, the companies are appealing to what they see as a significant number of people who expect electricity prices to climb even higher.
In Springfield, initiatives are underway to deal with the triple threat of higher prices, dirty air and power shortages.
Under CEJA, three agencies — the Illinois Power Agency, the Illinois Commerce Commission and the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency — are required to submit a report to the legislature by Dec. 15.
In this report, they'll make recommendations on, among other things, whether the state should roll back its CEJA clean air goals to provide more electricity from fossil fuels, or double down on investments in battery storage and renewable power.Granahan said another big uncertainty is whether the Trump administration will continue a 30% federal tax credit for renewable energy projects.
The ICC has convened a yearlong series of hearings to determine whether the legislature should set a date for ending the use of natural gas in residential, commercial and industrial buildings, as it did for power plants under CEJA.
Meanwhile, working groups are meeting regularly in the legislature to prepare for a comprehensive energy bill likely to be debated in May.
The core of the debate is how much battery storage the state should deploy and at what cost. Money will be tight because of, among other things, potential Medicaid cuts in Washington. But the state has no choice, environmentalists say, in part because U.S. manufacturers of the gas turbines that generate electricity may lack the capacity to keep up with surging demand anyway.
Eventually, Gov. JB Pritzker will seek to enforce his final choices on what stays in the bill and what goes.
In an appearance at a Washington, D.C., think tank last week, Pritzker touted the near tripling of renewable energy production in Illinois during his tenure, according to a Chicago Sun-Times report. Then he added, 'I'm lucky I live in a state where about 50% of our electricity is produced by nuclear power plants.
'In a world where we need to move very quickly into a renewable and clean energy-powered world, we're in decent shape,' Pritzker said.
Some environmentalists disagree.
However, one of their main goals for now is to ensure that data centers pay for the additional electricity they need and not other ratepayers.
Abe Scarr, director of the Illinois Public Interest Research Group, wonders whether 'wasteful' forms of computer use, such as the global competitions cryptocurrency operators run to develop new forms of Bitcoin, should be limited.
At the very least, he said, the state should stop subsidizing data center construction to the tune of $370 million in 2024.
'At some point, we have to ask whether data centers are the kind of economic development we actually want,' Scarr said. 'We're not going to sacrifice our health and climate for the short-term boost of construction jobs.'
To Offerman, the village elder in Minooka, the conflicted answer is yes. He wants the data center.
'It's the best use of that land except for farmland,' Offerman said. 'It's much better than a hundred different things they could put there.'
To generate more electricity, Offerman thinks Illinois should expand its nuclear plants and build solar panels on top of buildings and not farms. He worries about natural gas because methane is dangerous. 'I wonder about stuff like that too,' he said.
And then there's the sheer scale of the changes confronting Minooka.
'The estimate for Minooka is that by 2070 or maybe 2080, we'll have 50,000 people. They're trying to figure out what the water needs are going to be, which, you know, good luck on that,' Offerman said.
'I can't imagine having 50,000 people. When I moved here, we had three hundred and I think sixty-eight people. That was in 1956.'